Wed, 17 Nov 2004

(This post might turn into hours of distraction from the task in hand, so I will try to be brief).

Way back when I was a Macintosh user. It was about the time that Apple switched to the PowerPC CPU series (System 7 I believe, I assume all of us here remember fat binaries?). The gossip in the halls, and I recall verifying it myself, was that there was an ASCII string in the code for System 7 which said something along the lines of "help! help! we're being held prisoner in a systems software factory" and was signed the blue meanies. I always assumed that they were called that as a reference to those nice folk at IBM who provided the CPUs for the machines, but apparently that's not the reason for the name.

Anyways, I'm spending the evening attending a school play (which was really quite good, and involved some nice product placement for my employer without any input from me [1]), and reviewing the 1.4 billion paper proposals for LCA. Yes, there is a constant scaling factor applied to that number, but I am sure you can work out to an order of magnitude what I am talking about. Anyways, there's some really good stuff there. I'm impressed. I sure hope I get to actually see some of the conference, as well as panicking and being grumpy.

1: There was a hobo character in the play. Apparently these school kids decided the best way of conveying hobo hood was to ware a cap from my employer. How very flattering. :)